CBR Bingo: Migrant (this book features the last of the human race fleeing a dying earth and travelling in stasis to find a habitable planet).
This one is actually a re-read for me. I first read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky back at the beginning of 2020 and loved it. I did intend to read the next book in the series (Children of Ruin), but for whatever reason, never ended up getting around to it. By the time I did get around to it, I’d forgotten most of the events of the first book, so decided to do a re-read.
The perspective is (mostly evenly) split between two groups of people (or uh, “people”).
First, we have the humans. Set in the far future, where there’s been several societal collapses and later rebuildings, the remnants of the race have built a spaceship and travelled for millennia to find a new home. Holsten Mason is a classicist scholar (basically, he studies the language and technology of earlier, more technologically advanced humans) and one of the key crew members of the ship. He mostly stays in statis for the journey but gets woken up for key events during the novel.
Secondly, we have a race of genetically enhanced spiders on an Earth-like planet. I am not a spider person, I will screech and wave my arms frantically when confronted with a real-life spider (no matter how tiny), but for some reason, reading about them doesn’t bother me (and certain events in the book had me genuinely emotional and concerned for their well-being). Millenia before the spaceship-humans left Earth for good, a scientist from pre-collapse human civilization released a virus onto the planet, that unintentionally caused the spiders to evolve at a more rapid rate than would be found in nature.
While the human side of the story is perfectly fine and interesting, it’s the spider side that’s truly fascinating. We get snippets of life at key intervals during their evolutionary journey, as they invent agriculture, wage war with other races and themselves, build and redefine societal structures and norms, and develop a religious-like relationship with a satellite in orbit.
I’ve just started the next book, and am super excited to see where the series goes next!